There is obviously a need for some updated data on how many hashtags to use on Instagram. And it needs to be data gathered from real business pages, not just scraping Instagram and including outliers like the Kardashians!

Hypothesis: Posts with 6-7 hashtags will get more engagement than posts with less or more hashtags.

Plan of Attack

I’ll use the following 4 Instagram accounts to methodically post with a varying number of hashtags in order to come up with some valid data.

@Agorapulse

@ScottAyres

@SpaceWalkCTX

@Gracebiblegatesville

I will post a minimum of 40 posts per account during the study with hashtag quantities ranging from 1-10. I’ve set a maximum of 10 hashtags as not to look overly spammy.

The hashtags for this study will all be in the text of the posts, not in the comments.

For the purpose of this study, we’ll count likes/hearts as our metric of engagement. I chose not to track comments as they require more actions from users and are less common across Instagram.

In addition to counting the stats for the 40 posts I intentionally scheduled, I will collect data on the posts for the last 6 months on these accounts

I’m also going to subsequently gather data from the past 6 months from some popular social media accounts that I do not manage and track the number of Likes against the number of hashtags used.

@suebzimmerman

@TheInstagramExpert (Sue’s training account)

@isocialfanz

I choice these 3 as they are leaders in social media advice, especially Instagram. They post regularly enough to have a hearty sample size for me to measure.

Stumbling Blocks

Originally I had chosen 3-4 other social media experts and were going to use them as examples. But found quickly that they either use no hashtags or always use over 11 hashtags (over the max I spoke about earlier) and thus wouldn’t be useful data for this test.

The accounts I did include also had many posts with over 11 hashtags, while I did gather that data I’m not including it in my initial findings.

I also noticed that on the 3 accounts I did include in the data, @suebzimmerman, @TheInstagramExpert and @isocialfanz many of their posts added the hashtags to comments, rather than the original post.

That’s a strategy many have chosen to do and perhaps a future study can compare results of doing this.

So that I had consistent data I counted hashtags if they were in the post or the 1st comment by the account.

What the Data says about Hashtags on Instagram

After manually counting the number of Likes and hashtags for nearly 1000 Instagram posts for these accounts here are the results.

Test pages:

On the accounts I own and tested there was a bit of a variance. With 8 hashtags, 10 hashtags and 6 hashtags having the highest number of Likes depending on the account. So no clear winner.

Social Media Experts:

Let’s see how the experts in social media did regarding the number of likes per hashtag:

Once again 6, 7 and 8 hashtags had the most Likes depending on the account surveyed.

Agorapulse:

I also gathered data from the Agorapulse Instagram account.

9 hashtags had the edge on our account, with 7&8 coming in for a tie at 2nd most.

When I average the results from my test pages I find that 8 hashtags had the most Likes for these accounts.

Was I Right?

The highest performing hashtag count for the Social Media Experts was 8, it was also 8 for my test pages, and even when I averaged the 2 groups together 8 hashtags came out on top!

Seems that “8 is great” when it comes to the number of hashtags you should use in your Instagram posts!.

7 hashtags came in 2nd in all groups (10 tied for 2nd in the total average of all pages)

My hypothesis was that 6-7 hashtags would get the most engagement, but in reality it appears 7-8 is the actual correct answer with 8 hashtags being the better number to get engagement.

So I was close, but off just a bit.

What Now?

Based on the knowledge that Instagram posts with 8 hashtags outperformed all others on average, I would suggest posting with 8 hashtags moving forward for your accounts and I’ll be doing this on my own Instagram accounts.

Keep them relevant to your post and your niche business. Meaning if your photo isn’t about fitness don’t post #fitfam just because you know it’s a popular hashtag. Use an app such as Hashtagify to find related hashtags, or take a look at what hashtags are working for your competition.

Create your own hashtags. Start posting with the same hashtag related to your business so that those posts can be found with 1 click. Something like #mybouncehouselife can be a fun way to set yourself apart and people can click on it and see everything you’ve posted with that hashtag.

Switch it up. Don’t always post with the same 8 hashtags on every post. Change things up and experiment with different hashtags to see if you get more engagement.